Greater London Authority 2010 survey summary

The Greater London Authority (GLA) have, over the recent few years, showed a commendable willingness to make their various datasets available for mass consumption by the public. Their vehicle for doing this is a new website called London Datastore at http://data.london.gov.uk/. To understand more about what London Datastore is all about it read the paragraphs below that I have copied from the homepage:

The London Datastore has been created by the Greater London Authority (GLA) as an innovation towards freeing London’s data. We want citizens to be able access the data that the GLA and other public sector organisations hold, and to use that data however they see fit – free of charge. The GLA is committed to influencing and cajoling other public sector organisations into releasing their data here too.

Releasing data though is just half the battle. Raw data often doesn’t tell you anything until it has been presented in a meaningful way. We want to encourage the masses of technical talent that we have in London to transform rows of text and numbers into apps, websites or mobile products which people can actually find useful

…is taken from a face-to-face survey of 1,490 residents of Greater London, undertaken in early 2010 by BMG Research on behalf of the GLA. The questions explore areas of Mayoral policy and priority including policing and safety, the environment, transport, the Olympics and london life.

The data is available by demographic group, including gender, age, ethnicity and social class

You can also download the workbook and view it in your own copy of Microsoft Excel (you will need Microsoft Excel 2010). Downloading has the advantage that you can drag-and-drop data in and out of the pivot tables thus providing true analysis capability.

This new workbook contains 2 pivot tables that aggregate the data to make it meaningful. Those pivot tables use a series of slicers that enable you to chop and change the data as you see fit and discover insights not included in the official report.

Please let me know if this is at all useful and if it is please spread the word.

7 Responses

Hi Jamie,
I am involved in the Datastore team at the GLA and was involved in helping prepare the ALS data to go on the site. It’s great that you have shown an interest in this data and are publicising it to others. Sorry to hear that you have concerns about the data, hopefully I can put you at ease on at least a couple of the issues.

3. Your point about the lack of visualisation is true but does miss one of the key points of the London Datastore (and one you referred to at the start of your blog) which is to provide access to the underlying data so that anyone can do their own analysis or visualisation and isn’t restricted to the analysis that the GLA provides. Your work using the online version of Excel is a great example of this and we plan to add it to the site as an inspirational use that will hopefully give other people ideas for doing similar things themselves.

Please feel free to get in touch with us at datastore@london.gov.uk if you have any further questions about any of our datasets.
Regards
Gareth

I wouldn’t say I have concerns as such, I was only pointing out some issues with the dataset that I thought I could improve upon. Having said that I was not aware of the list of questions so I appreciate your providing the link.
Regarding the use of Excel 2003 – I suggest you guys catch up to the present day :)
My point about the lack of visualisation was not intended as a criticism and I apologise if it came across as such. On the contrary, I commend you for providing the data in its rawest form if for no other reason than it gives me the opportunity to add value to it.

I would be extremely grateful if you could add a link from http://data.london.gov.uk/, that is far and away above what I would expect from you. Its very much appreciated.

I would add that even if everyone in the GLA had version 2007 or 2010, unless all potential users in London had the same version, they would still have to provide the spreadsheets with maximum 255 columns, otherwise the data would not be accessible to quite a number of Londoners still using old versions.

Hi Daniele,
Unfortunately not, no. It occurred to me too that that would prove to be useful information. Having said that, with only ~1500 respondents I doubt there would be enough people per region to offer any worthwhile such analysis.

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